How to use Volatility3 as a Library?

[j3-jeffrey]

Thank you
First of all, many thanks to all the developers of this great project out there.

Can´t understand the Volatility3 as a Library
https://volatility3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using-as-a-library.html

Context
I am currently developing a module for Volatility3 for my final thesis in IT security and hopefully winning with it the Volatility Challange 2025. ;) Unfortunately, I find the page: https://volatility3.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using-as-a-library.html quite difficult to understand. I have already managed to execute Volatility3 commands as a library in my software. And in my opinion, sadly not beautiful. However, I cannot manage rendering it to a json file.

Support
I would be very happy if someone could revise the documentation or explain this to me:

1. How to render the TreeGrid format to json.
2. How to basicly use Volatility3 as a Library?

Thank you so mutch for your help! :)

[ikelos]

The renderers aren't part of the library, they're (somewhat) part of the CLI. There is already a JSON renderer that you can use as an example, but otherwise you'll need to read the data from the tree grid using a visitor method (which will visit each row of the tree grid in order) and then do with the results as you wish.

The library part of volatility is designed to take in inputs in a specific form (the configuration) and return the results in a specific form (the TreeGrid). The CLI is our canonical implementation and has comments to show the initial setup steps towards running the plugin, and then the final steps to process the Treegrid, but you can also examine how Volumetric consumes the Treegrid in order to produce results for a web interface, for example.